Company: Heat and Control

Website: www.heatandcontrol.com

Equipment Snapshot: Heat and Control chose SNAXPO 2018, the year’s premier snack event, to release the latest snack packaging technologies from Ishida for the North America/Latin America market. Heat and Control launched Inspira, the next generation VFFS bagmaker, and ACP-700, an automatic case packer that is new to Ishida’s packaging room line-up.

“This is a very exciting time for Heat and Control and Ishida. We can now offer a completely integrated and automated packaging room solution for the snack industry that can significantly improve efficiency and performance,” announced Jeff Almond, Heat and Control snack food industry manager-packaging. “The industry has been asking for effective automation and communications between the weigher, bagmaker, and case packer. Inspira’s ease of access, predictive maintenance, and ability to work with a wide variety of film makes it easy to operate. Also, with the Case Packer’s controls system’s feed forward and feedback features, the flow of bags is more measured and controlled. This reduces bottlenecks by continuously adjusting settings as bags are running through the system.”

The Inspira offers the highest levels of performance, efficiency, and quality, along with reduced environmental impact and improved operator working conditions, such as more automation which reduces human error. The ACP-700 case packer provides unmatched packing performance, such as toolless fully-automatic changeovers, and includes more standard features, such as a case erector and predictive maintenance tools to make it a highly efficient system that is easy to operate. Also, it has the smallest footprint available in the market and removed of the troublesome vacuum system typically required for bag handling.

A key element in the overall system is Ishida’s in-line seal checker (TSC) which utilizes feed forward communications to the Case Packer and feedback communications to the Inspira. TSC continuously monitors fill level and compares bags to the targeted value so the ACP-700 Case Packer can automatically optimize the machine operation appropriately, check for leaking bags, maximize cooperation, and deliver stable operation.

These new technologies ran live at SNAXPO, so visitors could see for themselves the capability and the performance of the snack packaging room of the future.